Thing 39 Digital Storytellilng

Thing 39. For persons interested in scrapbooking, this was a great learning tool. I read all of the info listed under Everything About Scrapbooking. What I really liked was Scrapblog. That site made scrapbooking easy. A lot of what they offered was free but if you wanted to purchase a page from them, you could. Learning about Scrapblog was the best part of Thing 39. I would only do scrapbooking at home.

Thing 38. Screencasting

Thing 38. I tried viewing Screen-o-matic's How to Create a Screencast, but my computer did not have have the correct version of JAVA. I switched to viewing the Jing tutorial but found the music interfered with the content--an example of a how not to do screencasting! The best overview that I found was Smashing Magazine's article titled Screencasting: How to Start, Tools & Guidelines. I am someone who would benefit from this type of instruction but I am not someone who could do screencasting unless I had more formal instruction. This is not something I could do at work or at home without more help. At least I know that screencasting exists.

Thing 37. Photo Tales

Thing 37: Since I never really figured out Flickr during the first 23 Things and I almost never use my husband's digital camera, I found #37 impossible to do. I guess the one good thing about reviewing this category is to see what one can potentially do with one's digital photos. I could see how these tools could be helpful when teaching a class. I really need a real live person to help me learn Flickr!!!

Thing 36 Comic Relief--Generate Some Fun

Thing 36: I picked the Generator Blog. Some of the items were simply silly and some were useful such as the design your own t-shirt. I checked out the ToonDoo and selected the Crazy Library cartoon. The cartoon showed a librarian telling patrons to be quiet. I used the Historic Tale Construction Kit under the Middle Ages Comics but I could not load it on my blog. I was able to email it to my personal email. In fact, I think I will send my family birthday greetings via this tool.

I could see the library's publics relation person using this tool, but I would not be able to use the comic generating tools for my work.

Thing 35. Books 2.0

Thing 35: In my branch that serves a higher income population, there continues to be a large appetite for the printed word. In fact, I amazed at the number of patrons who have mentioned that they have recently returned to reading as a leisure activity. The Book 2.0 tools that I investigated were primarily from the Readers' Advisory category. I even used a couple of the websites to help me get a list of similar authors. I made sure the websites were put in my work email folder.